Christmas Time

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

For a few weeks I have been experiencing problems getting email through Outlook 2011 for Mac. I would open up the Outlook application and outlook would freeze. I havent really had time to waste on trouble shooting it until today. In my own experience I have noticed that Mac and Windows Office goes together as well as oil and water. It just really doesnt play well with one another and MAC MAIL of all things is what I have been using. However the President of my work uses a Mac and I gotta make sure he is taken care of when his issues arise. So today I finally had some free time to trouble shoot this issue and as I mentioned before, Outlook on a Mac while convenient just has all kinds of issues. My issue specifically was Outlook freezing during startup. Basically I would open/run the the program and it would just sit there and if I was lucky it would error out and ask if I wanted to send a message to Microsoft. The first thing I thought of was like most people, Uninstall. Well on a Mac, you don't just uninstall things. You actually have to go into the Library and delete the cache items that way. If you don't your settings will be the same once your reinstall.

So I asked myself, why uninstall.. Just go to the Outlook 2011 database and delete the following folders.

Go to the above file location and delete your heart out. Everything you see can go.Once thats completed you have to rebuild your database with a new identity. Just opening up Outlook will not do this for you but will lead you down the right path. Dont worry about the first rebuild if that was unsuccessful delete the folder it made

From there go ahead and hit the rebuild button and name it something different. Then use the default option. In my case I had to do that because for whatever reason it told me this was a duplicate name. After renaming, close all the folders that have anything to do with microsoft and open Outlook.

Go ahead and reopen Outlook. You will have a blank Outlook which is just waiting for you to enter in your email settings.

Hopefully this will help you get passed those pesky Outlook 2011 freezing issues.